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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactor:

Archaeologists in Turkey Have Uncovered a Mysterious Ancient Kingdom Lost in History:

Last year, archaeologists were investigating an ancient mound site in central Turkey called Türkmen-Karahöyük. The greater region, the Konya Plain, abounds with lost metropolises, but even so, researchers couldn't have been prepared for what they were about to find.

[...] With the aid of translators, the researchers found that the hieroglyphs on this ancient stone block – called a stele – boasted of a military victory. And not just any military victory, but the defeat of Phrygia, a kingdom of Anatolia that existed roughly 3,000 years ago.

The royal house of Phrygia was ruled by a few different men called Midas, but dating of the stele, based on linguistic analysis, suggests the block's hieroglyphics could be referring to the King Midas – he of the famous 'golden touch' myth.

The stone markings also contained a special hieroglyphic symbolising that the victory message came from another king, a man called Hartapu. The hieroglyphs suggest Midas was captured by Hartapu's forces.

[...] What's significant about this is that almost nothing is known about King Hartapu, nor about the kingdom he ruled. Nonetheless, the stele suggests the giant mound of Türkmen-Karahöyük may have been Hartapu's capital city, spanning some 300 acres in its heyday, the heart of the ancient conquest of Midas and Phrygia.

See also: https://news.uchicago.edu/story/oriental-institute-archaeologists-help-discover-lost-kingdom-ancient-turkey

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactor:

A ‘Cure for Heart Disease’? A Single Shot Succeeds in Monkeys:

In the first gene-editing experiment of its kind, scientists have disabled two genes in monkeys that raise the risk for heart disease. Humans carry the genes as well, and the experiment has raised hopes that a leading killer may one day be tamed.

“This could be the cure for heart disease,” said Dr. Michael Davidson, director of the Lipid Clinic at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine, who was not involved in the research.

But it will be years before human trials can begin, and gene-editing technology so far has a mixed tracked record. It is much too early to know whether the strategy will be safe and effective in humans; even the monkeys must be monitored for side effects or other treatment failures for some time to come.

The results were presented on Saturday at the annual meeting of the International Society for Stem Cell Research, this year held virtually with about 3,700 attendees around the world. The scientists are writing up their findings, which have not yet been peer-reviewed or published.

The researchers set out to block two genes: PCSK9, which helps regulate levels of LDL cholesterol; and ANGPTL3, part of the system regulating triglyceride, a type of blood fat. Both genes are active in the liver, which is where cholesterol and triglycerides are produced. People who inherit mutations that destroyed the genes’ function do not get heart disease.

Freeman writes:

Microsoft’s “new approach” to retail stores: Closing them forever:

Microsoft's retail stores, like many retailers throughout the nation, have been closed for months due to the novel coronavirus pandemic. If you were hoping to visit one again as restrictions in your state ease up, however, you're out of luck: the Microsoft Store is done for good.

The company announced the closure today, amusingly, as the Microsoft Store taking "a new approach to retail," by which it means "not actually operating retail stores." Although four locations—in London, New York City, Sydney, and Microsoft's Redmond, Washington, campus—will remain open, they will become "experience centers," where one can see, touch, and play with Microsoft products but not actually purchase any.

Original Submission

chromas writes:

Zuckerberg once wanted to sanction Trump. Then Facebook wrote rules that accommodated him.

Hours after President Trump’s incendiary post last month about sending the military to the Minnesota protests, Trump called Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg.

The post put the company in a difficult position, Zuckerberg told Trump, according to people familiar with the discussions. The same message was hidden by Twitter, the strongest action ever taken against a presidential post.

To Facebook’s executives in Washington, the post didn’t appear to violate its policies, which allows leaders to post about government use of force if the message is intended to warn the public — but it came right up to the line. The deputies had already contacted the White House earlier in the day with an urgent plea to tweak the language of the post or simply delete it, the people said.

Eventually, Trump posted again, saying his comments were supposed to be a warning after all. Zuckerberg then went online to explain his rationale for keeping the post up, noting that Trump’s subsequent explanation helped him make his decision.

[...] Zuckerberg talks frequently about making choices that stand the test of time, preserving the values of Facebook and subsidiaries WhatsApp and Instagram for all of its nearly 3 billion monthly users for many years into the future — even when those decisions are unpopular or controversial.

At one point, however, he wanted a different approach to Trump.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Employers can't afford to ax mature workers, say researchers:

In a new article in the Australian Journal of Management, researchers warn employers not to make hasty decisions in either dismissing or discounting the input of older workers.

"Employers are well known for targeting mature workers when downsizing their workforce—but this might be a costly mistake," says Dr. Valerie Caines.

She notes that governments can also overlook the value of older workers, as shown by the SA Government recently pulling its funding to DOME (the Don't Overlook Mature Experience training organization), which provided valuable support services to mature job seekers.

"A common mistake is to think of mature workers as all being the same," says Dr. Caines. "There is huge variation among mature workers' motivations, capabilities and needs. Their experience is especially valuable now, because mature workers can offer considerable value to an organization during a crisis and play an important role in helping a business progress to the 'next normal.'"

Dr. Caines says older workers may also hold the solution for filling employment gaps in organizations, due to diverse skill sets they have developed through their working life.

"Mature adults demonstrate considerable resilience," she says. "The aspect of role modeling resilience is an especially important influence on younger workers. It includes mature coping strategies, emotional intelligence and empathy—and these attributes have never been more important in the workforce."

Journal Reference:
Valerie Dawn Caines et al. Older workers: Past, present and future, Australian Journal of Management (2020). DOI: 10.1177/0312896220918912

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

New Executive Order Fights Credential Inflation In The Federal Workforce:

On Friday, President Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to fill job vacancies based on merit, rather than require a minimum level of education for candidates seeking open positions. The order rightly recognizes that a job candidate with several years of relevant experience may be just as qualified, if not more so, than one who has collected a stack of advanced degrees.

"Employers adopting skills- and competency-based hiring recognize that an overreliance on college degrees excludes capable candidates and undermines labor-market efficiencies," the order reads. "Currently, for most Federal jobs, traditional education — high school, college, or graduate-level — rather than experiential learning is either an absolute requirement or the only path to consideration for candidates without many years of experience."

The order still allows federal agencies to prescribe minimum educational requirements for job candidates if the degree is legally required by the state or local government where the federal employee will be working. Additionally, they may consider a candidate's education if the degree "directly reflects the competencies necessary" to do the job.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

India bans TikTok, WeChat and dozens more Chinese apps

India's government has banned TikTok and dozens more Chinese-made apps it says are a danger to the country. In a statement, it said the apps were "prejudicial to sovereignty and integrity of India, defence of India, security of state and public order". In total, 59 different apps were banned - including popular messaging app WeChat.

It follows weeks of escalating tensions along the disputed border between the two countries. Both India and China deployed more troops to the Ladakh region in June, and minor clashes have left at least 20 Indian troops dead. Satellite images also appear to show that China has built new structures overlooking the Himalayan border region.

India's Ministry of Information Technology said it was banning the 59 Chinese apps after receiving "many complaints from various sources" about apps that were "stealing and surreptitiously transmitting users' data in an unauthorised manner".

TikTok and WeChat.

Also at CNBC and The Hill.

Previously: Bytedance: The World's Most Valuable Startup
Lawmakers Ask US Intelligence to Assess If TikTok is a Security Threat

Related: Indian Government Orders ISPs to Block 857 Porn Websites
China is Ramping up its Media Abroad – and Not Just in Chinese
Indian Court Orders YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter to Block "Defamatory" Video Worldwide

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactor:

AWS Facial Recognition Platform Misidentified Over 100 Politicians As Criminals:

Comparitech's Paul Bischoff found that Amazon's facial recognition platform misidentified an alarming number of people, and was racially biased.

Facial recognition technology is still misidentifying people at an alarming rate – even as it's being used by police departments to make arrests. In fact, Paul Bischoff, consumer privacy expert with Comparitech, found that Amazon's face recognition platform incorrectly misidentified more than 100 photos of US and UK lawmakers as criminals.

Rekognition, Amazon's cloud-based facial recognition platform that was first launched in 2016, has been sold and used by a number of United States government agencies, including ICE and Orlando, Florida police, as well as private entities. In comparing photos of a total of 1,959 US and UK lawmakers to subjects in an arrest database, Bischoff found that Rekognition misidentified at average of 32 members of Congress. That's four more than a similar experiment conducted by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) – two years ago. Bischoff also found that the platform was racially biased, misidentifying non-white people at a higher rate than white people.

These findings have disturbing real-life implications. Last week, the ACLU shed light on Detroit citizen Robert Julian-Borchak Williams, who was arrested after a facial recognition system falsely matched his photo with security footage of a shoplifter.

chromas writes:

Benefits Of Exercise Could Be Passed Through Breast Milk, Says New Study

Researchers at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center worked with academics from the University of California, San Diego, Arkansas Children's Nutrition Center and the Joslin Diabetes Center to highlight how moderate exercise in mothers could benefit children in the long run through breast milk. They found that maternal exercise causes adaptations in breast milk which included an increase in oligosaccharide 3'Sialyllactose (3'SL.)

It sounds complex but 3'SL is responsible for the development of key immunoprotective effects in newborns. It aids the development of the immune system and gut microbiota and suppresses adhesion and infectivity of bacteria and viruses, such as influenza viruses.

[...] "What we have shown in mice is that the offspring, as they age, do not become as obese and are less likely to develop type two diabetes, and female offspring are protected from heart failure as they age. More studies need to be done to determine how this will affect human infants," says Stanford, "I think this study highlights the importance of maternal exercise. Even moderately increasing your activity during pregnancy could have pretty dramatic effects on your child's health."

Journal Reference:
Johan E. Harris, Kelsey M. Pinckard, Katherine R. Wright, et al. Exercise-induced 3′-sialyllactose in breast milk is a critical mediator to improve metabolic health and cardiac function in mouse offspring, Nature Metabolism (DOI: 10.1038/s42255-020-0223-8)

Original Submission

NPC-131072 writes:

From The Guardian:

Nearly three months ago, in early April, the $1.75bn content experiment known as Quibi lurched from its rocky, much-maligned promotional campaign into full-scale launch. The service offered a tsunami of celebrity-fronted shows segmented into "quick bites" (hence, "qui-bi") of 10 minutes or less – a Joe Jonas talk show, a documentary on LeBron James's I Promise school, a movie with Game of Thrones's Sophie Turner surviving a plane crash, all straight to your phone. At the time, many of us wondered if Quibi could deliver on its central promise – to refashion the style of streaming into "snackable" bites – or if, teetering under the weight of its massive funding and true who's who of talent as the world shut down, it would become shorthand for an expensive mistake.

The service, the brainchild of the DreamWorks Animation cofounder Jeffrey Katzenberg and the former Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman – two billionaires deeply entrenched in Hollywood and Silicon Valley establishment – was "either going to be a huge home run or a massive swing and a miss," Michael Goodman, a media analyst with Strategy Analytics, told the Guardian. Given a string of bad news since its 6 April launch – missed targets, executive departures, Katzenberg singularly blaming the pandemic – and the sunset of its 90-day free trial with millions fewer subscribers than anticipated, the scales seemed decidedly tipped toward swing and miss. But while it's too soon to declare the end of Quibi, it's still worth asking: is the promise of the quick bite already over? And what went so wrong?

Previously: Meg Whitman-Run Streaming Service "Quibi" Launches, Reception Mixed

Related: Fox Could Buy Tubi While NBCUniversal Eyes Vudu

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/fcc-helps-charter-avoid-broadband-competition/

The Federal Communications Commission is helping Charter avoid broadband competition in New York State with a decision that will block government funding for other ISPs in locations where Charter is required to build.

The FCC plans to award ISPs up to $16 billion over 10 years from the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) in a reverse auction scheduled to begin in October. The FCC said in an announcement yesterday that it "granted Charter Communications' waiver request to exclude 2,127 census blocks in New York from the eligible areas list because the company will deploy broadband in those locations pursuant to a settlement reached with the State of New York."

Separately, the FCC denied a Frontier Communications request to exclude nearly 17,000 census blocks in parts of 29 states from the auction.

Original Submission

chromas writes:

How hackers extorted $1.14m from a US university:

A leading medical-research institution working on a cure for Covid-19 has admitted it paid hackers a $1.14m (£910,000) ransom after a covert negotiation witnessed by BBC News.

The Netwalker criminal gang attacked University of California San Francisco (UCSF) on 1 June.

IT staff unplugged computers in a race to stop the malware spreading.

And an anonymous tip-off enabled BBC News to follow the ransom negotiations in a live chat on the dark web.

[...] At first glance, its dark-web homepage looks like a standard customer-service website, with a frequently asked questions (FAQ) tab, an offer of a "free" sample of its software and a live-chat option.

But there is also a countdown timer ticking down to a time when the hackers either double the price of their ransom, or delete the data they have scrambled with malware.

Also at Security Week.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Security Expert Discovered Flaw in PS2 That Gives a Way to Play Any Game

A security engineer who uses the nickname "Cturt" has hacked a PlayStation 2 console and managed to make it run any game title that he burns on a DVD. We're not talking about pirated games here, but titles that were never meant to run on a PS2, like the classic Mario platformer, for example. The man is calling the hack "FreeDVDBoot" and claims that no hardware intervention or any other type of mods are required to make it work. All that is needed is the exploitation of an existing flaw that triggers a read overflow vulnerability.

The researcher gives all the technical details on his write-up, saying that he had to experiment with emulators a lot in order to figure out the crucial aspects that hide behind Sony's proprietary container format (VOB) used on the PS2 DVD disk reading system. The hacker looked specifically for buffer overflow vulnerabilities in the "getDiscData" call system and found four of them. The existence of these flaws means that if a disc specifies lengths larger than allowed, one can trigger a buffer overflow exploit. Based on this and some luck on the existence of valid memory jumps that occur in regions that can be modified, a series of corruption states can be achieved.

A similar exploit may work with the PS1, which only supports CDs, and the PS3 and PS4, which both support Blu-ray discs. The security engineer may be eligible to earn up to $50,000 for a working PS4 exploit.

PlayStation 2 was released in Japan in March 2000, and discontinued worldwide in January 2013.

Also at Ars Technica.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

EFF & Heavyweight Legal Team Will Defend Internet Archive's Digital Library Against Publishers

The EFF has revealed it is teaming up with law firm Durie Tangri to defend the Internet Archive against a lawsuit targeting its Open Library. According to court filings, the impending storm is shaping up to be a battle of the giants, with opposing attorneys having previously defended Google in book scanning cases and won a $1bn verdict for the RIAA against ISP Cox.

In March and faced with the chaos caused by the coronavirus pandemic, the Internet Archive (IA) launched its National Emergency Library (NEL). Built on its existing Open Library, the NEL provided users with unlimited borrowing of more than a million books, something which the IA hoped would help "displaced learners" restricted by quarantine measures.

After making a lot of noise in opposition to both the Open and Emergency libraries, publishers Hachette, HarperCollins, John Wiley and Penguin Random House filed a massive copyright infringement lawsuit against the Internet Archive.

[...] Last evening the EFF announced that it is joining forces with California-based law firm Durie Tangri to defend the Internet Archive against a lawsuit which they say is a threat to IA's Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) program. The CDL program allows people to check out scanned copies of books for which the IA and its partners can produce physically-owned copies. The publishers clearly have a major problem with the system but according to IA and EFF, the service is no different from that offered by other libraries. "EFF is proud to stand with the Archive and protect this important public service," says EFF Legal Director Corynne McSherry.

Previously: Internet Archive Suspends E-Book Lending "Waiting Lists" During U.S. National Emergency
Authors Fume as Online Library "Lends" Unlimited Free Books
University Libraries Offer Online "Lending" of Scanned In-Copyright Books
Publishers Sue the Internet Archive Over its Open Library, Declare it a Pirate Site
Internet Archive Ends "Emergency Library" Early to Appease Publishers

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Credit card skimmers are now being buried in image file metadata on e-commerce websites:

The attack is a variation that uses favicons, but with a twist. Malicious code was tracked back to a malicious domain, cddn[.]site, that is loaded via a favicon file. While the code itself did not appear malicious at first glance, a field called "Copyright" in the metadata field loaded the card skimmer using an[sid] header tag, specifically via an HTML onerror event, which triggers if an error occurs when loading an external resource.

When loaded onto a compromised website, the JavaScript grabs input from fields used to submit payment information, including names, billing addresses, and card details.

The Magecart group obfuscated the code within the EXIF[*] data, and unusually, will not simply send stolen data via text to a command-and-control server (C2). Instead, data collected is also sent as image files via POST requests.

"The threat actors probably decided to stick with the image theme to also conceal the exfiltrated data via the favicon.ico file," the researchers say.

It is thought that Magecart Group 9 is to blame, due to links made by security researcher @AffableKraut to domains and registrars also hosting scripts using the EXIF technique.

[*] EXIF: Exchangeable image file format.

Original Submission